Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore
Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore
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Shot in the Heart
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

Author: Mikal Gilmore

Narrator: Will Patton

Abridged: 3 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/05/2000


Synopsis

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born." Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates his story "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

About The Author

Mikal Gilmore has covered and criticized rock & roll, its culture, and related issues for many national publications.  He was music editor for the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and for twenty years has worked on the staff of Rolling Stone, where he has profiled many national figures.  His first book, Shot in the Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  


Reviews

Goodreads review by Janet on September 10, 2015

One of a handful of nonfiction works I will always remember, as if it is branded inside of me, I keep Shot in the Heart on the shelf alongside James Ellroy's My Dark Places--made me understand in many ways the darkest heart of America. Mikal Gilmore tells the story of his murderer brother, Gary Gilm......more

Goodreads review by Michael on April 13, 2020

Having read (and disliked) The Executioner's Song, I wanted to read the story of murderer Gary Gilmore from his youngest brother's perspective. Mikal refused to be consulted by Mailer and Schiller during the creation of the book and the 4h TV movie (with Tommy Lee Jones as Gary and Rosanne Arquette......more

Goodreads review by Shaun on February 17, 2015

A little disjointed at times but overall a compelling narrative of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the US after the death penalty was reinstated. (The death penalty had been deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment by a 1972 ruling, but a new ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1976 upheld......more

Goodreads review by Nnedi on November 15, 2011

Chilling, disturbing, and very well-told. Executioner's Song was over a thousand pages and a wonderful book. Nevertheless, it somehow managed to tell less than half the story. I'm really glad I read this right after. Now I get it. Now I see. Gary Gilmore wasn't just some crazy man (which makes his v......more

Goodreads review by Zarb on March 20, 2012

I was a bit hesitant to read this one, mainly because I'm wary of books by authors who draw their legitimacy mainly from just being close to events that capture the public imagination. Most of us are not great writers, or even good ones and thus when a book turns up in a fashion that suggests a publ......more


Quotes

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

"One of the most beautifully written, moving nonfiction books published in the past five years." -- Deidre Donahue, USA Today.

"Remarkable, astonishing... Shot in the Heart reads like a combination of Brothers Karamazov and a series of Johnny Cash ballads... chilling, heartbreaking, and alarming." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

"Mesmerizing... riveting and immensely moving... Shot in the Heart is a gesture of sustained courage that just happens to be a page-turner." -- Daphne Merkin,The New Yorker.


Awards

  • National Book Critics Circle Awards